Your public services (U.K.)

[Rum]

The reality of the new government's policies are beginning to sink in to me and to colleagues. I am close to retirement so I am not concerned about my own personal future in terms of employment, but I can report that where I work there are many frightened people. The cuts in public expenditure are intended to be 25% across the board. People in and around me are going to lose their jobs. Many people will.

Now while that is important, it is not as important as the services which will also be cut. Here are some of the choices that will have to be made, simply in my professional neck of the woods:

Should a child with special needs have a bit more money spent on their education?
Should schools whose standards are low have support to improve their performance?
Should the various agencies (health, police, children's services) continue to meet to review what they can do better to protect children from abuse?
Should combating domestic violence continue to be a high priority?
Should the poorest kids still get free school meals?

..and there are a hundred more..and a thousand if you look at all the non visible things that government expenditure does.

I am not some sort of bureaucrat who want things to remain the same because they 'should'. The world I work in really can and should be more efficient.

But 25% across the board means your life (if you live in the UK) will be affected either by smelly bins and potholes in the roads, or ultimately higher crime caused by the inevitable increase in poverty.

We voted for this..as ever being British, in a sort of non committal way.

[Feck]

Our local council failed to apply for millions of pounds of government funds they were entitled to (they forgot to apply in time )
They then spent almost all of the budget allocation for road repair on a fund to pay damage costs for all the cars they break .
They have been selling off assets at cut price and all sorts of other things .

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/a ... 927559.ece


When you add government cuts on top this .......We are just fucked .

[floppit]

Until as a culture we figure out that services for each other might be worth more to us than that HUGE fuck off telly, screwed we will remain. I don't like the new regime - I wouldn't trust them with a puppy but the fact is that they got voted in because the alternative might involve a degree of sharing and we're not big on that as a nation.

Meh - don't listen to me, I've had a bad week and would like to see some of our bureaucrats booted! I mean a 58 page long assessment form to go through with 90 yr olds - and apparently they need it FINE tuning! They'll have to send us out with water pistols to keep the poor sods awake!

[Trolldor]

We have two Xbox 360's - one of which is almost never used.
We have two plasma screen televisions - one fo which is never used.

Mean while my dad says we're wasting money when we buy computer games.

Wealth - it makes you fucking stupid.

[devogue]

The reality of the new government's policies are beginning to sink in to me and to colleagues. I am close to retirement so I am not concerned about my own personal future in terms of employment, but I can report that where I work there are many frightened people. The cuts in public expenditure are intended to be 25% across the board. People in and around me are going to lose their jobs. Many people will.

Now while that is important, it is not as important as the services which will also be cut. Here are some of the choices that will have to be made, simply in my professional neck of the woods:

Should a child with special needs have a bit more money spent on their education?
Should schools whose standards are low have support to improve their performance?
Should the various agencies (health, police, children's services) continue to meet to review what they can do better to protect children from abuse?
Should combating domestic violence continue to be a high priority?
Should the poorest kids still get free school meals?

..and there are a hundred more..and a thousand if you look at all the non visible things that government expenditure does.

I am not some sort of bureaucrat who want things to remain the same because they 'should'. The world I work in really can and should be more efficient.

But 25% across the board means your life (if you live in the UK) will be affected either by smelly bins and potholes in the roads, or ultimately higher crime caused by the inevitable increase in poverty.

We voted for this..as ever being British, in a sort of non committal way.

A few months ago I awarded myself a 40% pay cut and laid off staff - I may have to reduce my pay more, but what can I do? If I don't I will go out of business. Taxes and rates are killing me, but I pay promptly and I struggle on.

Last night on the local news I saw a local councillor justifying the council's £28,000 annual expenditure on a so called "super toilet" in a local village with a population of 1,400 people.

Of course I don't want to see people losing their jobs, and as the father of a child who has enjoyed the benefits of a special needs education I don't want to see a single penny cut from that part of the budget (in fact it should be increased), but as someone in the private sector who has seen a drastic downturn in business (but not taxation) I think that the public sector should suffer just as much - all of those lovely paid holidays, sick days treated as holiday entitlement, wonderful pensions, pay increases and the like...it's about time there was a bit of pain. I do think it should be focused, though - a scalpal taken to the worst and most obvious excesses while core services are protected.

[ficklefiend]

Our local council failed to apply for millions of pounds of government funds they were entitled to (they forgot to apply in time )
They then spent almost all of the budget allocation for road repair on a fund to pay damage costs for all the cars they break .
They have been selling off assets at cut price and all sorts of other things .

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/a ... 927559.ece


When you add government cuts on top this .......We are just fucked .

Useless, useless, cunts.

Last place I worked they spent money marked for school bus travel because it was in account labelled with our name and someone thought it was from us and not for us. We got it eventually, but jesus. Incompetent doesn't even cover it.

[Pensioner]

I have some sympathy for your anger Dev but I do think your comments are misplaced. “all of those lovely paid holidays, sick days treated as holiday entitlement, wonderful pensions, pay increases and the like...” The vast majority of public sector workers are not paid well or get wonderful pensions. Ask a bin man or a teaching assistant what they earn or what there pension will be. The chief executives of councils however or on a gravy train and there pay will be protected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... laim-fraud

“This isn't the first time in Britain's history that politicians with a programme of savage cuts have claimed "we're all in this together". An iconic Labour movement cartoon from the early 30s, when another coalition came to power in the wake of a financial crisis and slump, shows four class stereotypes of the day on a ladder. A cloth-capped unemployed man is standing at the bottom, up to his neck in water. "Equality of sacrifice – that's the big idea, friends!" says the silk-hatted figure at the top. "Let's all step down one rung."

Strip away the anachronisms and that's exactly the message George Osborne tried to give in his budget, as he unveiled the deepest and fastest cuts in public spending since the same period. David Cameron was at it again yesterday, claiming the budget would "protect the poor".

As the depression-era cartoonist highlighted, the idea that there can be any equivalence in belt-tightening for rich and poor is a nonsense. Even if the different income groups were paying proportionate shares, or the wealthy were actually shouldering a heavier burden, as Osborne claimed, the impact would obviously be far greater for those struggling on benefits than for beneficiaries of the boardroom bonanza.
But as more details of the Lib-Con coalition's extraordinary budget emerged yesterday, the bare-faced deceit at the heart of the government's claims has become brutally evident. Far from being a fair shares package that shelters the vulnerable, it's now clear that the net effect of Tuesday's announcements will be to hammer the poorest the hardest.

Even excluding the effect of wider spending and benefit cuts, the squeeze on the worst-off tenth of the population will, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, be five times the impact on the richest by 2015. Osborne insisted that his budget was progressive, fair and unavoidable. In reality, it was the exact opposite on all counts.

As the IFS confirmed yesterday, the budget's "overall impact" would be "regressive". Osborne had only been able to claim the rich would stump up a proportionately larger share by counting Labour tax and national insurance rises as his own measures. Add to that the fact that Osborne's estimates only go up to 2012 and don't include the full range of benefit cuts – let alone the wider services cull – and the chancellor's claims of a new fiscal transparency are exposed as a fraud.

By raising the regressive tax of VAT while bearing down heavily on housing, disability and child benefits – as he unveils plans to cut corporation tax year after year and let banks off with a levy that is dwarfed by swelling bonuses – Osborne has turned his and Cameron's boast of social togetherness into a sour joke.

Even where their actions come closer to matching their rhetoric, as in the boost to child tax credit, that will be more than offset by the housing benefit squeeze and scrapping of maternity and pregnancy grants, along with other benefits targeted at women and children.
Meanwhile Osborne was himself yesterday struggling to justify his claim that the scale of this assault on spending and welfare is unavoidable.

His insistence on balancing the budget in five years, a smaller state than under Margaret Thatcher and 25% cuts across most departments won't just hold back recovery and drive up unemployment, even according to the forecasts he commissioned. It will also sharply increase the risk of stagnation or renewed recession. That would raise the risk of a bond market crisis, not see it off.

Of course we have already been softened up for a major squeeze. But Osborne's £40bn fiscal tightening and £99bn cuts plan has gone far further than either the previous government's already drastic programme, or even what "the markets" were demanding or expecting. Nor does the government have a mandate for such an assault. Not only did the Tories refuse to spell out what they were planning during the election, but the Liberal Democrats actively campaigned against what has now been announced.

Lib Dem voters, after all, backed a party which stood against early cutbacks, in support of a ratio of cuts to tax increases of two-and-a-half to one, and fiercely opposed the threat of a "Tory tax bombshell" of increased VAT. Barely six weeks later, they've ditched all three commitments in the name of coalition compromise and the eurozone crisis, and signed up to a budget which, despite a handful of one-nation gestures, is Thatcherite to the core.
Lib Dem leaders are now insisting that they've won major concessions, even if they seem to have forgotten that some of these supposed triumphs – such as a bank levy and restoring the pensions-earnings link – were also Conservative policy. In reality, an inexperienced Lib-Dem leadership has been taken to the cleaners, signed up to policies that will damage their own voters and laid the ground for the breakup of the coalition.

Vince Cable may claim to be "comfortable" with a programme of social regression. But it was Conservative MPs who were cheering on Tuesday, and the Tory right that ensured the wealthy will still be able to dine off the loophole of capital gains tax, while the poor and disabled pay the price of the bankers' recession.

It's hardly a surprise that Lib Dem MPs such as Bob Russell are already finding their new role as Cameron's fall-guys too much to stomach; or that prominent Lib Dems such as Richard Grayson are complaining that a "centre-left party is being led from the centre-right". The faultline in the party and the coalition can only deepen.

Right now, public opinion is unstable over the prospect of cuts, with two polls in the past week facing in different directions. The coalition wants to front-load the social pain, with the full impact of this autumn's cuts biting in the new year. The idea then seems to be to repeat Thatcher's trick of the early 1980s, when growth eventually picked up in the wake of a harshly deflationary budget.

But where that growth is supposed to come from in today's much less promising economic conditions, when the Lib-Cons are planning to slash demand by at least 6%, while the rest of Europe is also imposing austerity and imagining it will be able to export its way into shrinking markets, Osborne offered no clue. If ideology fails to trump reality, expect a political eruption next year.”

[floppit]

I have some sympathy for your anger Dev but I do think your comments are misplaced. “all of those lovely paid holidays, sick days treated as holiday entitlement, wonderful pensions, pay increases and the like...” The vast majority of public sector workers are not paid well or get wonderful pensions. Ask a bin man or a teaching assistant what they earn or what there pension will be. The chief executives of councils however or on a gravy train and there pay will be protected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... laim-fraud

“This isn't the first time in Britain's history that politicians with a programme of savage cuts have claimed "we're all in this together". An iconic Labour movement cartoon from the early 30s, when another coalition came to power in the wake of a financial crisis and slump, shows four class stereotypes of the day on a ladder. A cloth-capped unemployed man is standing at the bottom, up to his neck in water. "Equality of sacrifice – that's the big idea, friends!" says the silk-hatted figure at the top. "Let's all step down one rung."

Strip away the anachronisms and that's exactly the message George Osborne tried to give in his budget, as he unveiled the deepest and fastest cuts in public spending since the same period. David Cameron was at it again yesterday, claiming the budget would "protect the poor".

As the depression-era cartoonist highlighted, the idea that there can be any equivalence in belt-tightening for rich and poor is a nonsense. Even if the different income groups were paying proportionate shares, or the wealthy were actually shouldering a heavier burden, as Osborne claimed, the impact would obviously be far greater for those struggling on benefits than for beneficiaries of the boardroom bonanza.
But as more details of the Lib-Con coalition's extraordinary budget emerged yesterday, the bare-faced deceit at the heart of the government's claims has become brutally evident. Far from being a fair shares package that shelters the vulnerable, it's now clear that the net effect of Tuesday's announcements will be to hammer the poorest the hardest.

Even excluding the effect of wider spending and benefit cuts, the squeeze on the worst-off tenth of the population will, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, be five times the impact on the richest by 2015. Osborne insisted that his budget was progressive, fair and unavoidable. In reality, it was the exact opposite on all counts.

As the IFS confirmed yesterday, the budget's "overall impact" would be "regressive". Osborne had only been able to claim the rich would stump up a proportionately larger share by counting Labour tax and national insurance rises as his own measures. Add to that the fact that Osborne's estimates only go up to 2012 and don't include the full range of benefit cuts – let alone the wider services cull – and the chancellor's claims of a new fiscal transparency are exposed as a fraud.

By raising the regressive tax of VAT while bearing down heavily on housing, disability and child benefits – as he unveils plans to cut corporation tax year after year and let banks off with a levy that is dwarfed by swelling bonuses – Osborne has turned his and Cameron's boast of social togetherness into a sour joke.

Even where their actions come closer to matching their rhetoric, as in the boost to child tax credit, that will be more than offset by the housing benefit squeeze and scrapping of maternity and pregnancy grants, along with other benefits targeted at women and children.
Meanwhile Osborne was himself yesterday struggling to justify his claim that the scale of this assault on spending and welfare is unavoidable.

His insistence on balancing the budget in five years, a smaller state than under Margaret Thatcher and 25% cuts across most departments won't just hold back recovery and drive up unemployment, even according to the forecasts he commissioned. It will also sharply increase the risk of stagnation or renewed recession. That would raise the risk of a bond market crisis, not see it off.

Of course we have already been softened up for a major squeeze. But Osborne's £40bn fiscal tightening and £99bn cuts plan has gone far further than either the previous government's already drastic programme, or even what "the markets" were demanding or expecting. Nor does the government have a mandate for such an assault. Not only did the Tories refuse to spell out what they were planning during the election, but the Liberal Democrats actively campaigned against what has now been announced.

Lib Dem voters, after all, backed a party which stood against early cutbacks, in support of a ratio of cuts to tax increases of two-and-a-half to one, and fiercely opposed the threat of a "Tory tax bombshell" of increased VAT. Barely six weeks later, they've ditched all three commitments in the name of coalition compromise and the eurozone crisis, and signed up to a budget which, despite a handful of one-nation gestures, is Thatcherite to the core.
Lib Dem leaders are now insisting that they've won major concessions, even if they seem to have forgotten that some of these supposed triumphs – such as a bank levy and restoring the pensions-earnings link – were also Conservative policy. In reality, an inexperienced Lib-Dem leadership has been taken to the cleaners, signed up to policies that will damage their own voters and laid the ground for the breakup of the coalition.

Vince Cable may claim to be "comfortable" with a programme of social regression. But it was Conservative MPs who were cheering on Tuesday, and the Tory right that ensured the wealthy will still be able to dine off the loophole of capital gains tax, while the poor and disabled pay the price of the bankers' recession.

It's hardly a surprise that Lib Dem MPs such as Bob Russell are already finding their new role as Cameron's fall-guys too much to stomach; or that prominent Lib Dems such as Richard Grayson are complaining that a "centre-left party is being led from the centre-right". The faultline in the party and the coalition can only deepen.

Right now, public opinion is unstable over the prospect of cuts, with two polls in the past week facing in different directions. The coalition wants to front-load the social pain, with the full impact of this autumn's cuts biting in the new year. The idea then seems to be to repeat Thatcher's trick of the early 1980s, when growth eventually picked up in the wake of a harshly deflationary budget.

But where that growth is supposed to come from in today's much less promising economic conditions, when the Lib-Cons are planning to slash demand by at least 6%, while the rest of Europe is also imposing austerity and imagining it will be able to export its way into shrinking markets, Osborne offered no clue. If ideology fails to trump reality, expect a political eruption next year.”

Bloody well written educating read!

[AnInconvenientScotsman]

The reality of the new government's policies are beginning to sink in to me and to colleagues. I am close to retirement so I am not concerned about my own personal future in terms of employment, but I can report that where I work there are many frightened people. The cuts in public expenditure are intended to be 25% across the board. People in and around me are going to lose their jobs. Many people will.

Now while that is important, it is not as important as the services which will also be cut. Here are some of the choices that will have to be made, simply in my professional neck of the woods:

Should a child with special needs have a bit more money spent on their education?
Should schools whose standards are low have support to improve their performance?
Should the various agencies (health, police, children's services) continue to meet to review what they can do better to protect children from abuse?
Should combating domestic violence continue to be a high priority?
Should the poorest kids still get free school meals?

..and there are a hundred more..and a thousand if you look at all the non visible things that government expenditure does.

I am not some sort of bureaucrat who want things to remain the same because they 'should'. The world I work in really can and should be more efficient.

But 25% across the board means your life (if you live in the UK) will be affected either by smelly bins and potholes in the roads, or ultimately higher crime caused by the inevitable increase in poverty.

We voted for this..as ever being British, in a sort of non committal way.

Can I just point out that the issue highlighted is far more complex than is being made out. There may be small increases in petty crimes if there is an increase in relative poverty but there's no link between increases in relative poverty and increases in major crimes. Even within this there are the complex arguments over what should constitute a crime and whether we should even use that framework in our policy making decisions. Higher crime rates do not necessarily indicate a problem and "crime rates" are highly subjective, dependant on what is being labelled a crime. For example, a homeless man could be charged with theft for stealing a yoghurt from a massive, multinational company like Morrisons, doing no harm whatsoever in the process, yet this would contribute to crime statistics whilst the major misuse of the tax-payers money by MPs would not.

I would be happy to see cuts in the funding for policing and an end put to the idea that more money = less crime, because it does not. The money we waste on tracking down and charging people for insignificant, harmless offences whilst failing to charge the well off for major white collar crime, could be well used in trying, at least, to ease the impact of the budget on other departments.

[ED209]

Petty crimes are what people are more concerned about however, since they are common and affect the average person. The heinousness of infrequent crime is of less concern than the frequency of petty crime. The likelihood of being murdered is not correlated to the economic climate, whereas the likelihood of being burgled is to some extent. I'd be pretty pissed off if I were burgled, and I would not think "Lucky this criminal only burgled me, instead of raping a busload of disabled children."

[Rum]

During the last major recession (overseen by the Tories) crimes like burglary, car theft and theft from persons (mugging) climbed quite dramatically.

We expect..well we hope anyway..for competence from governments and usually we don't get it. What we get is an ideology and policies they want to put into place. In the UK that is 'filtered' by the civil service. Unlike America where the 'administration' brings all its senior planners and bureaucrats with it our 'impartial' civil service remains in place to implement the policies of the new government.

So when they arrive full of ambition and idealism (well that might be a bit much to ascribe to them)..full of notions about change and undoing the 'bad things' their predecessors did, they are faced with the civil service telling them what they can and can't do.

The arrival of this lot and messages about 25% cuts in public services and a desire for 'smaller government' does not seem to have been thought through. A reduction of 25% of police funding at the same time welfare payments are reduced and other support systems too is tantamount to actually creating a crime wave.

That aside, the government have little choice in this. The macro economics of the moment have us all in its grip. Governments have no real choice other than to bend to the whims of the 'markets'. These are now the most serious and dangerous enemy of the well-being of ordinary people in my view.

[RuleBritannia]

20% VAT? I already avoid buying things 'cause they're too expensive.

[JimC]

20% VAT? I already avoid buying things 'cause they're too expensive.

And a similar reaction from many other consumers will make a recession edge into a depression...

[RuleBritannia]

20% VAT? I already avoid buying things 'cause they're too expensive.

And a similar reaction from many other consumers will make a recession edge into a depression...

The whole problem was caused by too much debt and now they want to make things more expensive, it's just loopy!

[Horwood Beer-Master]

...Governments have no real choice other than to bend to the whims of the 'markets'. These are now the most serious and dangerous enemy of the well-being of ordinary people in my view.

They have been for over 100 years.